This is the seventh in Dusty's stories - as you may have noticed, I came up with a numerical theme for the stories and this is number 7.

What else but the Seven Deadly Sins - and the opposing Seven Heavenly Graces - for this story.

As before, I hope you enjoy the story.

pictures from Google free to use search

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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The Shudder Sister who had created the fuss in the cafe had got a long way ahead but the streets were almost deserted and Dusty could see her and the girl who was following.

Dusty looked, but couldn’t see the other old woman who had entranced the other girl across the road, but there were lots of streets going the same direction, they could have taken any one of a number of them.

The Shudder Sister didn’t look back to see if the girl was following her, she knew she was.

The girl didn’t look back to see if anyone was following her, she didn’t care.

Dusty did care, she made certain no one was following her as she made her way through the town and out past the marketplace.

They went past the older parts of town and beyond the poorer areas, out where development was starting to take place, where houses were being demolished, ready for a new wave of improvements.

A long row of terraced houses stretched out before Dusty, house after house, each joined to the next and next with no gap between save for a narrow alley to allow access to the back of the row.

Marked for demolition, the houses were all boarded up and empty – or should have been.

Dusty saw glimpses of movement behind a few upstairs windows without shutters or boards but she ignored whatever it was that was watching, they didn’t have anything to do with the Norns, she knew by instinct.

Those creatures hiding in the abandoned houses were altogether different and for another occasion - perhaps.

The girl from the cafe disappeared down one of the narrow alleys between two houses and Dusty followed.

She could see the silhouette of the girl as she ran towards the sunlight at the other end of the alley and before she had emerged into the sunlight, Dusty set off to follow her. As she got to the end, the girl looked both left and right and then went right.

Dusty had a chance to catch her up but she was wary as she came to the exit, it wouldn’t do to be ambushed at such a late stage in the pursuit.

Dusty climbed up the wall like a human spider, using the uneven brickwork to gain purchase with hand and foot.

She looked out from a vantage point that would have been feet above any ambusher.

She had been right to be cautious, the Shudder Sister beneath her didn’t look up – perhaps she couldn’t look up because of her bent frame and her hat; but Dusty was relieved.

The Shudder Sister lowered her heavy gnarled stick and scuttled off behind the cafe girl.

Dusty dropped to the ground and followed at a more cautious distance.

She looked around as she emerged from the alley.

It was only as wide as a normal doorway, just enough room for two people to pass – if they were very careful and polite.

The alley opened out onto two back yards, separated by the remains of a rickety fence.

There was a large nail in the wall close to her on her left, it was above head-height and had probably been used to hold the tin bath before the houses were fitted with the ‘modern conveniences’ of an indoor bathroom.

A pathway ran along the entire row, across the doorways and under the windows of the kitchens. Where it had once been dissected by fences for privacy’s sake, the fences were gone, the demolition was moving slowly but surely and the path was uninterrupted by boundaries.

Another pathway ran parallel to the first, just a few feet away at the end of what would have been a private yard for each house.

Yet more paths dissected that at right-angles to lead away into the rubble-strewn wasteland that had once been people’s back gardens. Puddles were dotted about to give a weird otherworldly sense of an abandoned planet. A lone digger stood sentinel over its domain, the destruction to be continued later.

The garden fences were still in place closest to the houses and Dusty felt the deep sense of sadness that the history of the place, the families that had grown up there, the generations that had lived and died there had been reduced to nothing more than a few sticks of fencing and piles of rubble to show that anyone had ever lived, loved and died in the houses.